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When he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and other charges in 2005, Stephen Slevin had no way of knowing that an opinion about his mental state would put him on a path to spend more than 22 months of solitary confinement in a New Mexico county jail, despite never having his day in court. This week, he reached a $15.5 million settlement with Dona Ana County.

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If you reach back into the dark crevices of your memory to last September, you may recall that a man was mauled by a tiger after he jumped out of the Bronx Zoo’s Wild Asia Monorail and into a tiger den. David Villalobos, 25, told police at the time that he jumped because he wanted “to be one with the tiger,” not because of any suicidal impulses. But his mother begs to differ: she claims her son’s mind was warped because of Adderall addiction. And she thinks the tiger incident may have saved his life: “He was always interested in animals, and we brought him up as a Christian, but Adderall changed his way of thinking,” his mom, Fernanda, told Lawyers and Settlements.

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Police arrested a young mother from Centralia, Washington, last week after footage surfaced on YouTube showing her allowing her 22-month-old son to inhale marijuana smoke from a bong. 24-year-old Rachelle Braaten was charged with delivery of a controlled substance to a minor as well as manufacture of marijuana after officers found as many as 40 marijuana plants inside her home. Several weapons were also found.

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Three 6 Mafia rapper DJ Paul — famous for his song “Sippin’ on Some Syrup” — has some words of advice for Justin Bieber … stay away from sizzurp, or you could die. Paul was out in Vegas this week when we asked him about the photos circulating of Justin Bieber — showing the singer surrounded by double cups and codeine — and the rapper tells us, Bieber’s playing with fire. Paul says, “I can’t say don’t do [sizzurp] because I did my rounds with it. But I stay away from it these days because I had a lot of friends that passed away from it. It’s dangerous if you do too much of it.”

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A Roane County woman who died after taking two doses of LSD could be the first reported acid-related fatality in the state and one of the few documented globally. Prosecutors are still awaiting toxicology results to make that distinction. An autopsy hasn’t been completed on Renee Honaker, 30, of Left Hand, who died last week. Lab results for the acid strips she allegedly took aren’t back yet either, Roane County Prosecuting Attorney Josh Downey said on Saturday. Police charged Renee’s husband, Todd Anthony Honaker, 34, with first-degree murder after the couple apparently each took two hits of LSD on March 1. Renee later fell to the floor, began convulsing and died. Police also charged Chad M. Renzelman, 32, of Kennewick, Wash., the chemist they said manufactured the drug, with first-degree murder. He is being held in jail awaiting extradition to West Virginia.

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Diane Shattuck filled a prescription in December for a generic antibiotic called doxycycline. With insurance, she paid $4.30 for 60 pills at a CVS store in Orange. She returned at the end of February to refill her prescription. This time, she was told her cost for the drug would be about $165. “It was bizarre,” Shattuck, 73, told me. “And no one at CVS could explain why the price was so high.” Unfortunately, I won’t be able to offer a clear-cut answer, either. But my effort to untangle Shattuck’s situation cast a harsh light on the shadowy world of drug pricing. It revealed that different manufacturers can charge wildly different prices for what is essentially the same generic medicine, and that drugstores can rake in unconscionable profits by passing along marked-up meds to customers without the slightest explanation. “It’s a very murky world,” said Jeffrey McCombs, a professor of pharmaceutical economics and policy at USC.

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A 21-year-old man who told officers he loved cocaine and needed more cocaine was arrested after he was caught running naked through an apartment complex. On Feb. 24 the Crestview Police Department received numerous reports from Bel-Aire Apartments about a man running naked and yelling through the complex. At one point he tried to get into a car of a woman and her young child. When lawmen arrived the man, now wearing pajama pants, leaped onto the hood of the patrol car and wouldn’t get down until ordered. He lay down on the grass nearby, where he made several comments about loving cocaine and needing more cocaine.

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At 21 Andrew got a job at Butlins in Minehead, Somerset, and during that time he experimented with drugs such as ecstasy and LSD as a way of dealing with the psychological effects of being born without his manhood. He said: “By taking drugs I gave myself the perfect cover. “I’d bed girls but said things could only go so far because the drugs meant I couldn’t rise to the occasion. “I’ve been to bed with over 100 women. Some were one-night stands, some long-term relationships. I’ve told 20 per cent of them the truth. “The fact I didn’t just want to get my leg over made me more attractive to women. I had charm and patter because it wasn’t all about sex.”

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Heroin addicts in Denmark, who are given state-sponsored fixes, say they are bored now that they don’t have to chase drugs, a non-profit group says. Once drug addicts end up admitted into a heroin clinic they receive twice-daily prescription doses of state-funded heroin, the Fyens Stiftstidende reported. Mette Guul, head of Reden Odense, a YWCA center for abused women and prostitutes in Aarhus, said many don’t know how to handle their newly found free time, the Fyens Stiftstidende said. “The women say they are lonely, bored and do not know what to do now that they do not have to chase the drugs anymore,” Guul told the newspaper.

The producers of History Channel’s “The Bible” miniseries say Internet chatter that their Satan character resembles President Barack Obama is “utter nonsense.”

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A teenage boy opened a can of Bud Lite then drank it off a girl’s breasts. When the story was later recounted to another partygoer who was wearing a cap with the word ‘t*****s’ on it, he said: ‘Awesome!’ During an aborted attempt to drink out of a beer bong, a girl ended up covered in Budweiser. He male friend said, pointing to her t-shirt: ‘You got it wet, take it off!’ He added, pointing to his large bottle of Miller Lite: ‘Whatever he says is the rules.’ Soon after the casualties began to appear. A portly woman who could no longer stand was hauled out of the crowd by two male companions where she became abusive towards them. A teenage girl collapsed behind the toilets with saucer like eyes and vacant look to her face.

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Thought of as a soft drink. Strong enough to kill. Yes. One 12 oz oca Cola is all it takes to end a human life. Many women when late try to end their pregnancy, in poor countries, and over a period of time, they’ve worked out the best way to do it. All they need is a 12 oz bottle of Coca Cola. This they boil for fifteen minutes. Then they leave it out in the midday sun from morning til afternoon. This must do something to alter the chemical composition, because that alone, when drunk, can be fully effective to cause an abortion. They only add headache pills to beef up the solution, and whack, the pregnancy’s over. It works in about half of cases, my partner assures me. Her friends have used it successfully.

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“The guards sounded the sirens from the prison towers and rushed in with tear gas guns and other firepower. At first, O.J. was watching all this from a distance and didn’t even notice that two inmates were approaching him. “Then, one of ‘The Girls’ spotted a flash of metal. It was sunlight reflect­ing from the blade of a knife wielded by a skinhead rushing at O.J. At the same time, another one of ‘The Girls’ saw an attacker coming from the other side. “The two skinheads charged toward O.J. They lunged at him and slashed at his face, coming close to cutting him. Luck­ily, they were blocked by his girly-man buddies. They may act like chicks but, believe me, they’re darn tough.”

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Terrell Garrett faces two counts of aggravated driving under the influence and two counts of reckless homicide, according to Sally Daly, spokeswoman at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. Charges were filed on Saturday afternoon. Garrett allegedly drove the wrong way on Lake Shore Drive, striking two cars head on in the southbound lane near LaSalle around 4 a.m. Friday morning. Two people — Fabian Torres, 27, and Joaquin Garcia, 25– were killed. A third person was treated at the hospital and released.

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“So what exactly is this magic ingredient that will be appearing in a new version of Pepsi, and how is it made? Unfortunately, those questions are hard to answer. Senomyx… refers to them only as ‘enhancers’ or ‘ingredients’… The products work by triggering receptors on the tongue and tricking your taste buds into sensing sweetness — or saltiness or coolness, in the case of the company’s other programs… So are Senomyx’s covert ingredients safe? That, too, is anyone’s guess… many of its enhancers have ‘been granted’ GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) status, but all that means is that the company did its own assessment and then concluded everything was fine. We don’t know whether Senomyx did any testing since the company isn’t required to submit anything to the FDA.14 There’s no reason to think that Senomyx’s products will cause harm, but until or unless Pepsi decides to share details about how exactly it’s achieving a 60 percent reduction in sugar while keeping the taste …

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Facebook officials are now acknowledging that the social media giant has been able to create a running log of the web pages that each of its 800 million or so members has visited during the previous 90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where millions more non-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visit a Facebook web page for any reason. Allegations from Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner that Facebook was creating “shadow profiles” of non-users were initially refuted by Facebook’s spokesman Andrew Noyes, who said categorically that “The allegations are false.” But Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, engineering director Arturo Bejar, engineering manager Gregg Stefancik, corporate spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin, and Noyes have now revealed the extent of the company’s tracking. As previously thought, Facebook are using cookies to track anyone who visits a Facebook.com page.

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We, the undersigned, would like the Obama administration to recognize the need for a new national anthem, one that even a decade after its creation, is still hot and fresh out the kitchen. America has changed since Francis Scott Key penned our current anthem in 1814. Since then, we have realized that after the show, it’s the afterparty, and that after the party, it’s the hotel lobby, and–perhaps most importantly–that ’round about four, you’ve got to clear the lobby, at which point it’s strongly recommended that you take it to the room and freak somebody. President Obama: we ask you to recognize the evolution of this beautiful country and give us an anthem that better suits the glorious nation we have become.

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In the context of such gravity, the hangup had a clear and forceful meaning. It offered a way of ending a conversation prematurely, sternly, aggressively. Without saying anything, the hangup said something: we’re done, go away. My father took great pride in hanging up our model 554 phone violently when something went awry. An inbound wrong number dialed twice in a row, or an unwelcome solicitor. Clang! The handset’s solid mass crashed down on the hook, the bell assembly whimpering from the impact. The mechanical nature of telephones made hangups a material affair as much as a social one. A hangup is something your interlocutor could feel physically as much as emotionally, and something you couldn’t downplay either. Like slamming a door or yelling at a child, hanging up a phone couldn’t be subdued or hidden.

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Checkpoints (some would say illegal checkpoints) have been popping up quite frequently in the USA. As you see in this video, you DO NOT have to comply with their question’s or demands. Don’t forget, you have rights.

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There are four general types of checkpoints you might encounter: DUI checkpoints, US border checkpoints, drug checkpoints, and TSA checkpoints. In a legal sense, they are not all created equal. So depending on which one you encounter, you’ll want to be prepared to flex your rights appropriately.

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Google has the marketing power to make acting like ‘Creepy Cameraman’ socially acceptable. Would you have even considered wearing a hidden spy camera or recording conversations a few years ago? Well soon everyone will be doing it and finding you odd for objecting. There is no way to know if you are being recorded by someone wearing Google Glass or a similar device. This is in contrast to a smart phone where the user must visibly hold the camera up to take a picture or record video. We must therefore assume that we are being recorded at all times(and possibly publicly broadcast) from a low angle where ones face is clearly visible. Even if the user is not recording video, audio for their own use it may still be being collected and processed in the cloud in order to display contextual information using image, object, face, voice identification and speech recognition. (so called augmented reality) for example. Display the G+ or Facebook profile of the person you are looking at.

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The opposition will congregate in dark corners. They will whisper with their mouths, while their eyes will scan the room for spies wearing strange spectacles. The spies will likely be men. How many women would really like to waft down the street wearing Google Glass? It won’t be easy. Once you’ve been cybernated, there’s no turning back. Which is why the refuseniks are already meeting in shaded corners of the Web. One site is called “Stop The Cyborgs.” It claims to be “fighting the algorithmic future one bit at a time.” A sticker being offered on the “Stop The Cyborgs” Web site. It’s going to take a lot of bitty fighting, but the people behind this site — they’re naturally anonymous, in an attempt to stop Google spying on them — say they’re fighting Google Glass in particular. They say that it will herald a world in which “privacy is impossible and corporate control total.”

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So, we’re done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites. And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant. Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.

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The Herald Sun understands remote access to the venue’s security system was given to an unauthorised person. Images relayed from cameras were then used to spy on a top-level gaming area where the high roller was playing. Signals were given to him on how he should bet based on the advice of someone viewing the camera feeds. Sources said the total stolen was $32 million. The cameras at Crown are state-of-the-art, high-resolution technology. They are capable of transmitting the most intricate detail of goings-on inside the building.

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An alleged auto thief tried to escape capture by car, foot and boat Wednesday but was caught in Oakland with the help of several law-enforcement agencies that surrounded him by air, land and sea, authorities said. Terry Rizzo was caught after he ditched a stolen car, fled on foot and dove into the Oakland Estuary before trying to escape in a sailboat, said Alameda County sheriff’s Sgt. J.D. Nelson. Rizzo, surrounded by officers on the ground and others in a helicopter and a boat, eventually gave up and was booked into a downtown Oakland jail on warrants for theft and auto theft. “I’ve seen a lot of people try to avoid being arrested, but they don’t usually go through a criminal triathlon to get away,” said Nelson, who added that Rizzo had a small amount of methamphetamine in his possession when arrested.

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When Bruce Tomb realized that flying cars weren’t on the imminent horizon, he decided to make his own. The outcome might not be what you’d expect. With the help of some friends, Tomb created “Maria del Camino.” She’s an excavator topped with a 1959 El Camino, mounted on a hydraulic array that lifts it high off the ground. Her body is adorned with thousands of drilled-out holes, and her hood sports a portrait of the robot woman from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which shines when the light hits it. In simple terms, it’s nothing but sheer magnificence. Maria is currently being worked on at the DIY space Nimby in Oakland California. We stopped by to ask Tomb how — and why — he built his “flying” car, and he took us for a beer run, stopping traffic along the way. As for future modifications, Tomb has a big one in mind. “Been working on removing the manual controls,” he says. “I’ve heard driverless cars are all the rage!”

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Following Rubio’s “Watergate” incident, Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute and author of the book Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, took to Twitter to ask Nestlé, owner of the brand, just how much Poland Spring bottled water is actually from the iconic source in Maine. He’d been trying, he says, for years to get an answer to that question. This time, he got one: about a third.

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Witten and a generation of urban latchkey kids who spray-painted their initials all over Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s and landed in the city’s street art scene are coming of age — middle age, that is.

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On an average, more than a kilogram of heroin was seized every day on the Indo-Pak border adjoining Punjab for the first six months of this year. Records with the Border Security Force (BSF) show that in the first half of 2012, the force has seized a record 197 kilograms of heroin worth nearly Rs 1,000 crore. This is nearly three times more than 68 kgs seized last year. It is also the highest amount of the drug seized in the past five years.

Warner Bros have confirmed that they are working on a prequel to the Jack Nicholson thriller – which contained the famous line, “Heeere’s Johnny.”

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Cheese is the slang name for a mixture of black tar heroin and Tylenol PM. The substances are combined and come out looking much like parmesan cheese. The resulting product is sold for as little as $2 per hit. Kids in the Dallas-area are buying “cheese” with their lunch money, according to media reports. They’re snorting the stuff up their noses – often at school – and dying in alarming numbers, according to the Dallas County medical office. A recent study by the Dallas Independent School district determined that more than 5,000 kids have tried cheese. More than two dozen have died of overdoses. Most, like Mariela, first take the drug in middle school. That’s shocking. Middle school students are being targeted by drug dealers and turned into heroin addicts before they reach high school.

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One day this spring, on the condition that I not reveal any details of its location nor the stringent security measures in place to protect its contents, I entered a hidden vault at the Israel Museum and gazed upon the Aleppo Codex — the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible. The story of how it arrived here, in Jerusalem, is a tale of ancient fears and modern prejudices, one that touches on one of the rawest nerves in Israeli society: the clash of cultures between Jews from Arab countries and the European Jews, or Ashkenazim, who controlled the country during its formative years. And the story of how some 200 pages of the codex went missing — and to this day remain the object of searches carried out around the globe by biblical scholars, private investigators, shadowy businessmen and the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency — is one of the great mysteries in Jewish history.

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As you scan the face on that giant billboard, it may just be scanning your face right back. Increasingly sophisticated digital facial-recognition technology is opening new possibilities in business, marketing, advertising and law enforcement while exacerbating fears about the loss of privacy and the violation of civil liberties. Businesses foresee a day when signs and billboards with face-recognition technology can instantly scan your face and track what other ads you’ve seen recently, adjust their message to your tastes and buying history and even track your birthday or recent home purchase. The FBI and other U.S. law enforcement agencies already are exploring facial-recognition tools to track suspects, quickly single out dangerous people in a crowd or match a grainy security-camera image against a vast database to look for matches.

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Mitt Romney offended Palestinians again today, saying that Israel was more prosperous than Palestine because of its superior culture and the will of God. “You notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” between Israel and Palestine, Romney said at a fundraiser in Jerusalem today, citing each nation’s per-capita GDP, the AP reports. He went on to say that in considering Israel’s accomplishments “I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things” including the “hand of providence.”

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The essence of the infor­ma­tion war is the timely inter­jec­tion, dis­tor­tion or omis­sion of news events. Reports can min­i­mize, omit or basi­cally bury key news sto­ries that require analy­sis while mag­ni­fy­ing oth­ers which are of lesser impor­tance to the keen, ana­lyt­i­cal mind. While the Bat­man mas­sacre is tragic, the buzz in the so called alter­na­tive media cir­cle is cen­tered around the litany of ongo­ing sto­ries that will be sti­fled in the week to come by the main­stream media’s focus on the Aurora, CO shoot­ing. Beyond that, the analy­sis you read here is not all pre­sented as 100% fact, some con­clu­sions are pre­sented in light of other evi­dence, and where noted, some are spec­u­la­tive based on edu­cated the­ory. In this era of total media bom­bard­ment, to the point of over­load, some events have to be con­sid­ered beyond just what is con­firmed in print or on video and must be eval­u­ated in the full con­text of pos­si­ble human behav­ior.

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The Justice Department is suing a telecommunications company for challenging a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for customer information — despite the fact that the law authorizing the request explicitly permits such challenges. According to documents provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing the telecom, the company (whose name is one of the many redacted details in the documents) received a national security letter (NSL) in 2011. An NSL is essentially a self-issued search warrant whereby the FBI bypasses the Fourth Amendment and demands information about an individual without bothering to obtain a judge’s consent — and forces the recipient of the letter to keep mum about it because disclosure would allegedly harm national security. NSLs were employed somewhat sparingly prior to 2001 but became widely used — and abused, as the Justice Department’s inspector general reported in 2007 — after the misnamed Patriot Act loosened the require

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Though increasingly looked down upon here in the U.S. as a sign of slothfulness and low socioeconomic status, routine fast food consumption in some parts of the world is actually considered to be culturally desirable. But as foreigners progressively adopt the American fast-food lifestyle in place of their own native foods, rates of chronic disease are skyrocketing, including in East and Southeast Asia where diabetes and heart disease rates are off the charts. According to a recent study published in the journal Circulation, globalization continues to usher U.S.-style fast food into East Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia, where natives, especially those from the younger generations, are quickly adopting things like hamburgers and fries in place of their traditional fare. And based on the data, this Western fast food craze is responsible for a significant uptick in cases of diabetes and heart disease.

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Neurologists working with monkeys at Washington University in St. Louis to decode brain activity have stumbled upon a rather surprising result. While working to demonstrate that multiple parameters can be seen in the firing rate of a single neuron (and that certain parameters are embedded in neurons only if they are needed to solve the immediate task), they also found that they could read their monkeys’ minds. This isn’t exactly ESP, but it is really interesting. The researchers came to find out that by analyzing the activity of large populations of neurons, they could discover what actions the monkeys were planning before they made a single motor movement. By monitoring neural activity, the researchers could essentially see what the monkey was thinking about doing next.

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In a recent interview, Chihuahua state spokesman Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva told Al Jazeera that the CIA and other international “security” outfits “don’t fight drug traffickers.” Instead, Villanueva argued, they try to control and manage the illegal drug market for their own benefit. “It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Villanueva told the Qatar-based media outlet last month at his office in Juarez. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.” Another Mexican official, apparently a mid-level officer with Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Department of “Homeland Security,” echoed those remarks, saying he knew that the allegations against the CIA were correct based on talks with American agents in Mexico. “It’s true, they want to control it,” the official told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.

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What those trying to aggressively market an ever more “exotic sex life” fail to realize is that sexual preferences aren’t shaped by artifice. Buying a leather slapper won’t suddenly give you a penchant for spanking—and let’s face it, if you were really into the idea in the first place, you probably would have gone DIY and just picked up a hairbrush long before now. Making people feel shitty about their vanilla-ness is mainly a capitalist calculation. As any marketing exec knows, the moment people become satisfied is the moment they stop buying stuff.

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A research team from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and West Virginia University have troubling findings for those who think iris scanning is one of the safest methods of biometric security. Their reverse-engineered, “replicated eye” image was able to bypass iris scanning, fooled into thinking the synthetic image was real and correct. Javier Galbally and his team printed out synthetic images of irises taken from codes of real irises stored in security databases to test iris-scanning vulnerabilities. An iris code is the data stored by recognition systems when they scan a person’s eye. This is information that the researchers could replicate in their synthetic images. A commercial iris system only looks for the iris code and not an actual eye, Galbally noted. He and his team tested their fake irises against a leading commercial-recognition system. In 80 percent of attempts, the scanner believed that the attempt was a real eye.

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Shooter James Holmes even went as far as to take Vicodin, a drug found in Heath Ledger at the time of his death. Vicodin is a powerful pain-killer with morphine-like effects that is used in mind control to “dull out” victims. Is there some kind of ritualistic connection between The Dark Knight, the sacrificial death of Heath Ledger and this new installment of a Batman movie that was “launched” with a mass murder? Is there a reason why this mass-murder, which occurred during the midnight screening of a movie called Dark Knight RISING took place in a city called Aurora, the name Roman goddess of dawn (dawn being the time where the sun begins to rise)? Another interesting fact: Aurora is considered to be the mother of the morning star, also know as the Light Bringer, or Lucifer.

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Social scientists hungry for Facebook’s data may be about to get a taste of it. Nature has learned that the social-networking website is considering giving researchers limited access to the petabytes of data that it has amassed on the preferences and behaviour of its almost one billion users. Outsiders will not get a free run of the data, but the move could quell criticism from social scientists who have complained that the company’s own research on its users cannot be verified. Facebook’s in-house scientists have been involved in publishing more than 30 papers since 2009, covering topics from what drives the spread of information and ideas to the relationship between social-networking activity and loneliness. However, because the company fears breaching its users’ privacy, it does not release the underlying raw data.

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Two of the most common causes of blindness are retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease, and macular degeneration, an age-related disorder. Both are characterized by damage to the rod and cone cells in the retina, which robs the eye of its photoreceptors. Treatments for these forms of blindness focuses on restoring the retina’s abilities, and we’ve seen a few examples — stem cell injections, implantations of light-sensitive compounds using viruses, and a whole host of electronic devices and artificial retinas. A chemical called AAQ can also make these damaged cells sensitive to light again, and it wouldn’t require any foreign substances or stem cells.

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The cloud backup guys over at Backupify put together a calculator to help folks estimate the value of their cloud-based Google Gmail web mail accounts. So what’s the average account’s worth? $3,588.85, Backupify’s Jay Garmon writes in a blog post. That’s the value of the time invested in the average Gmail account, given how many emails the average Gmail user has written (5,768), how long it takes to write the average email (one minute, 43 seconds), and the most recent U.S. Depart of Labor statistics on average annual salary ($45,230). In other words, if the average Gmail user were paid to recreate all the Gmail messages he or she’s ever written, it would cost $3,588.85.

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They are a lowly, sturdy food designed for desperate cravings and vending machine convenience. They can endure weeks of neglect and even a mild mashing in a coat pocket or backpack. They are, it should come as no surprise, especially beloved by a similarly hardy but disrespected population: Florida’s prison inmates. Inmates in the Florida prison system buy 270,000 honey buns a month. Across the state, they sell more than tobacco, envelopes and cans of Coke. And they’re just as popular among Tampa Bay’s county jails. In Pasco’s Land O’Lakes Detention Center, they’re outsold only by freeze-dried coffee and ramen noodles. Not only that, these honey buns — so puffy! — have taken on lives of their own among the criminal class: as currency for trades, as bribes for favors, as relievers for stress and substitutes for addiction. They’ve become birthday cakes, hooch wines, last meals — even ingredients in a massive tax fraud. Thanks Jasmine

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Rhonda Roshell Washington, 33, told police her husband was high on PCP when they got into an argument about his drug use at their home in Bryan early Thursday, the Bryan-College Station paper reports. The fight turned physical, she said, and she jabbed him in the hand with her keys. Her husband, however, claimed she became upset about something on his Facebook page and chased him with a knife, stabbing him in the hand.

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This isn’t a story about a skateboarding giant, the UK’s largest skateboard has been created to mark the fact two thirds of children think the Olympics will only be worth watching when more extreme sports like skateboarding are included, obviously. Measuring a staggering seven metres in length, two and half metres in width and at a metre high, the oversized board weighs as much as a baby African elephant – so any ‘ollies’ or ‘kick flips’ are probably out of the question.

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Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

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Despite repeated assurances in public and to the Information Commissioner, Google has admitted that it did not in fact delete all the data, which could include passwords and emails, collected over open WiFi networks by its Streetview mapping cars in 2010 in a number of countries around the world. The news means that Britain’s recently reopened investigation into the so-called WiFi snooping could be bolstered by an opportunity to re-examine evidence that the ICO had asked to be destroyed. The ICO has demanded to examine the data “immediately” to look for evidence that it is in fact more extensive than Google had originally claimed, as authorities in America had discovered for data collected there.

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But he also said that, months later, when it came time to set bailout terms for the Too Big To Fail Set, the government just had no other choice but to use Libor. Sure, that’s one way to look at it. Another, less charitable way to look at it is that the Fed was fully aware that Libor was being manipulated lower, and was fine charging an artificially low rate to lend money to banks and to AIG, in what amounted to yet another kind of bailout. Why make life harder for them, right? They had enough problems dealing with the crisis they had created. Raising red flags about Libor might have only made the crisis worse, making it harder for banks to borrow money. But in the process, the government left untold mountains of cash on the table for U.S. taxpayers. Even if Libor was only manipulated a tiny bit lower, these small breaks add up.

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America treats sex, not violence, as the biggest threat to families and the nation, starting with Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings bestowing action flicks that brutalize half-naked nymphets a PG-13, but anything suggesting female pleasure the deathly NC-17, as happened with the marital cunnilingus scene between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine. A common argument against gay marriage or condom commercials is, “What would I say to my kids,” as if sex talk destroys childhood innocence.

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The control freaks are winning, and they are absolutely killing America. Our founding fathers intended to establish a nation where Americans would be free to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in an environment where freedom was maximized and government interference was minimized. Unfortunately, our nation has turned away from those principles and is now running 180 degrees in the other direction. For some reason, our political system tends to attract psychotic control freaks that want to micromanage our lives and make most of our decisions for us. These control freaks are actually convinced that freedom and liberty are “dangerous” and that there should be a rule or a regulation for just about everything. This is not just happening on the federal level either. The truth is that the control freaks are often the worst on the local level. When you add up the red tape on all levels of government, we literally have millions of laws, rules and regulations in America

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An email to F-Secure — allegedly sent from an AEOI scientist — detailed the attack, noting that the malware has shut down some of the facility’s automated processes. The rather vague wording of the email leaves a few unanswered questions as to just what parts of the AEOI are in danger, but one piece of information was very clear: The insidious software prompted several of the group’s computers to begin playing the song “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC in the middle of the night, and at full volume.

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A revolutionary discovery is rewriting the history of underwear: Some 600 years ago, women wore bras. The University of Innsbruck said Wednesday that archeologists found four linen bras dating from the Middle Ages in an Austrian castle. Fashion experts describe the find as surprising because the bra had commonly been thought to be only little more than 100 years old as women abandoned the tight corset.

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On Wednesday, Baumgartner took another stratospheric leap, this time from an altitude of more than 18 miles — an estimated 96,640 feet, nearly three times higher than cruising jetliners. He landed safely near Roswell, N.M. His top speed was an estimated 536 mph, said Brian Utley, an official observer on site. It’s the second test jump for Baumgartner from such extreme heights and a personal best. He’s aiming for a record-breaking jump from 125,000 feet, or 23 miles, in another month. He hopes to go supersonic then, breaking the speed of sound with just his body.

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What started out as a joke 35 years ago ended with a Massachusetts man paying off his mortgage using 62,000 pennies. “I’ve never saved anything other than pennies. And it started out as a whim. You know, a penny for the mortgage,” Thomas Daigle told NBC affiliate WHDH-TV of Boston. Daigle, from Milford, Mass., recalled how, after signing the mortgage papers 35 years ago, he found a penny on the ground. He and his wife then joked about collecting pennies to pay off the loan — and the rest is history. Over the next 35 years, Daigle would roll pennies, 50 cents at a time. His bank found out the hard way just how much work that was — it reportedly took tellers two days to unroll the penny cases.

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Reports of odd-colored lobsters used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada. Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown. But in recent years, accounts of bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters – one color on one side, another on the other – have jumped. It’s now common to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the quirky crustaceans to shore.

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A report by a group of civil and human rights attorneys released Wednesday morning paints the clearest picture yet of the New York City police department’s aggressive tactics and over-policing, all of which resulted in the systemic suppression of the basic rights of Occupy protesters. The report, which chronicles events from late September 2011 up to July of 2012, extensively documents numerous ways in which the NYPD acted with excessive force, attempted to intimidate and harass members of the press, expelled activists from public space due to the content of their speech, and ultimately concludes that authorities broke international law in their handling of Occupy Wall Street.

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In 2008, ten times more civilians regular people were killed by cops than cops were killed by perps. In 2011, 72 cops were shot and killed in the entire U.S.; in L.A. County alone, cops shot and killed 54 suspects the same year–22 percent of those people were unarmed. As Scott Reeder reported at Reason this morning, “Farmers, ranchers, commercial fishermen, loggers, garbage collectors, truck drivers, construction workers, pilots, steel workers, roofers, and others are far more likely to face death on the jobs than police or firefighters, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” And as Choire Sicha wrote earlier this year, “2008 was the ten-year low for police officers being killed, and 2012 is, so far, year-to-date, down 49% from last year.”

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Like virtually all massacre shooters before him, the notorious Batman shooter James Holmes is now reported to have been taking hardcore pharmaceutical drugs. In Holmes’ case, they happen to be the very same drugs that ultimately led to the early death of actor Heath Ledger. With a fix for ‘altering his state of mind’, the ‘Batman shooter’ was heavily hooked on the prescription painkiller Vicodin. Holmes even reportedly dosed up on a pharmaceutical cocktail just before the shooting. Side effects of Vicodin use, even at ‘recommended’ levels which Holmes likely far exceeded, include ‘altered mental states’ and ‘unusual thoughts or behavior’.

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The New York Police Department will soon launch an all-seeing “Domain Awareness System” that combines several streams of information to track both criminals and potential terrorists. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the city developed the software with Microsoft. Kelly says the program combines city-wide video surveillance with law enforcement databases. He says it will be officially unveiled by New York’s mayor as soon as next week.

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According to the Student Press Law Center, which investigated the girls’ arrest, officials in Hood County, Texas, are refusing to say whether the girls (who were arrested July 16) are still being detained. The center’s reporting suggests that the girls have been behind bars for more than a week for the crime of pranking a fellow student on Facebook

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Sunday police arrested 15-year-old Trevon Isaac after his 59-year-old grandmother called 911 and said Isaac had raped her in her sleep. Court documents state the boy’s grandmother said when she woke up Thursday morning “her privates were hurting and she noticed her panties were missing.” She later found them “under her bed and they had been cut.” The woman told police she ”takes medications at night for medical reason and the medications put her to sleep.” The next night she told police she slept on the couch and the woke up to “Isaac thrusting against her” and that he ran into the bathroom yelling “I just touched you.” The woman later called 911 and her son. Her son picked up Isaac and also called police. The victim’s son said Isaac told him, “I cut her panties off while she was in bed” and “I had sex with grandma.” Court records state he also said that he “had sex with grandma on the couch.”

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Jonah Falcon was stopped and frisked by the TSA at the San Francisco International Airport on July 9 because of a bulging package hidden in his pants. But the 41-year-old New Yorker wasn’t packing a dirty bomb, drugs or a Costco-sized tube of toothpaste. The New Yorker has the world’s largest recorded penis. In an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post, Falcon described his hard times with security guards after his extra carry-on became suspect. “I had my ‘stuff’ strapped to the left. I wasn’t erect at the time,” said Falcon, whose penis is 9 inches flaccid, 13.5 inches erect. “One of the guards asked if my pockets were empty and I said, ‘Yes.'” Falcon said he knew that his interview was about to get a lot more personal when he was led through one of the X-ray body scanners and passed a metal detector. “Another guard stopped me and asked me if I had some sort of growth,” Falcon said, laughing. Indeed he did have a growth.

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The Burger King employee involved in the disturbing picture showing someone standing with shoes on a container of shredded lettuce was fired by the owner of the local franchise, the company said in a statement to Fox8.com. Many details of the picture that was posted on 4chan.org, a social networking website, remain unclear, but the anonymous user reportedly posted the picture along with a comment that said, “This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King.” According to a HyperVocal.com report, an aggravated 4chan user tracked the image’s geo-tagging to locate the employee. The photo was tagged back to Ohio. A Burger King spokeswoman would not confirm the precise location the picture was taken.

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A Brooklyn woman pleaded guilty to her role in a fraud ring that embezzled $57 million from a group that helps compensate victims of Nazi persecution. Zlata Blavatnik, a former clerk for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, faces up to 40 years in prison after admitting to her role in the conspiracy that approved nearly 5,000 fraudulent applications in exchange for kickbacks. The 64-year-old pleaded guilty Tuesday.

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Shying away from certain questions, Calitz, who claimed she was raped by her captors, said more would be revealed in a book they were planning to write about their ordeal. In their almost two years in Mogadishu, Somalia’s largest city, the couple said they were moved – blindfolded – about 17 times. Calitz said she bore no grudges: “They were young enough to be my children, I can’t hate them. They don’t know any different.” Pelizzari said some pirates appeared to be friendly, but they had a rule not to speak to the hostages for more than a minute at a time. “Some were ruthless, but others would sneak us a banana or something now and again,” he said. “I don’t know if it was part of their plan.” The couple said their only link to the world – and a source of entertainment – was the oil-drenched newspaper wrapping their meals. “We’d read whatever news we could find and do the cryptic crosswords in our heads,” he said.

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The fast food chain Chick-fil-A has long been suspected of having an anti-gay agenda, and this week, the company’s COO has decidedly come out on the side of the ‘biblical definition of the family unit.’ Dan Cathy, the president of the multimillion-dollar empire said in an interview with the conservative paper Baptist Press that his company is ‘very much supportive of the family,’ but only when it involves heterosexual couples. ‘Well, guilty as charged,’ Cathy responded when asked about Chick-fil-A’s backing of ‘traditional’ families with a husband and wife.

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Eight months ago, Robert Downs, 51, set up a small structure in the woods near the Tujunga Ponds Wildlife Sanctuary in Sunland, Calif. To hide his home from police, Downs, who was previously homeless, sprayed it with camouflage paint and cut down nearby trees, said Johnie Jones, a deputy in the Parks Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The structure, which Downs built with materials he bought at Home Depot, contained four bunk beds built into the walls, tables, shelves and fire extinguishers. Outside were a rock patio, a barbecue grill and more tables. An American flag was draped over Downs’ bed. Downs stood a chance of evading major legal trouble for his hidden house, but sheriff’s deputies also discovered that he cultivated eight marijuana plants outside the structure, a felony because he did not have a permit to do so, Jones said.

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It first became apparent to my parents that something was wrong when I was four or five months old. I began chewing on my tongue while teething. They took me to a paediatrician where I underwent a series of tests. At first they put a cigarette lighter underneath my foot and waited for my skin to blister. Once they saw that I had no response to that then they began running needles up and down my spine. And since I had no response to either of those tests they came to the conclusion that I had what I have – congenital analgesia. By which point, I had chewed off about a quarter of my tongue through teething.

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The program, called Viral Peace, seeks to occupy the virtual space that extremists fill, one thread or Twitter exchange at a time. Shahed Amanullah, a senior technology adviser to the State Department and Viral Peace’s creator, tells Danger Room he wants to use “logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments, not just to confront [extremists], but to undermine and demoralize them.” Think of it as strategic trolling, in pursuit of geopolitical pwnage.

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Shares in Facebook continued to slide on Tuesday, after an analyst claimed the dominant social network had seen a modest drop in its userbase. Capstone Investment’s Rory Maher said Mark Zuckerberg’s company suffered a 1.1 per cent fall in US users over the last six months. The number of European Facebookers had also declined, he added. Meanwhile, Facebook’s stock hit a month-long low yesterday finishing the day at $28.09 on Nasdaq, after falling some 8 per cent at the start of the week.

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Modern social scientists, who are little more than unscientific socialists, variously view racism as a cancer, a sin, an aberration, and a mental illness rather than a natural and ubiquitous phenomenon. Ignoring the fact that every culture throughout human history has been ethnocentric, they frame racism as an exclusive product of white supremacy, European colonialism, and predatory palefaced capitalism. They also shellac it with a thick gloppy glaze of moralistic condemnation, depicting it as the worst and most destructive of all possible human instincts. The psychological establishment is well on its way to depicting “sociobiological” as personality disorders rather than natural drives toward self-preservation, which in a bygone era were seen as the epitome of mental health.

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However, the error message sounded as if Facebook was analyzing the contents of the message and deciding what was relevant or not, which would go beyond traditional anti-spam measures and veer into censorship territory. “Wow, does Facebook do sentiment analysis on comments and keeps you from posting negative comments?” Scoble asked on his Facebook page. Facebook’s Error Message Scoble’s “This Comment Can’t Be Posted” pop-up message stated the following: “This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.” There was an “Okay” button to close the error message.

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At the time of this report, Facebook “likes” such as “incest” and PTHC (preteen hardcore pornography) were still available in the website’s search engine. One open group with 145 members, “Incest,” offered the following description of the crowd: “all mom dad sister bro aunt f–kers.” A Facebook user by the name “Bizzy Bones” declared: “I masturbated with my cousin once. She was 15. I was 14.” Several visitors to the page liked the listing and one eagerly asked, “How was ur experience?” Another page under the title “Incest” had 1,527 likes. A fourth had 12,311 likes. A fifth had 2,376 likes. Two more had 403 likes. Meanwhile, WND recently reported 34 more links to the FBI depicting images and videos of child sex abuse in a period of only a few days. As part of a two-month undercover news investigation, WND used alias Facebook profiles and located dozens of child-porn images after “friending” many likely pedophiles and predators who trade thousands of pornographic photos

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With that being said, there is a part of me that believes that Lady Gaga isn’t sincere with her antics and is just doing so because she needs a gimmick to separate herself from the rest of the group. With Prince and Madonna, they weren’t acting crazy because they were trying to be different, they were just extravagant figures who have very unique views on many things so they expressed it in their attire and music. I am pretty sure that they probably look back at it now and figure how crazy they were back then, but at least that is who they were. With Lady Gaga I do not get that same type of vibe as I believe she is just putting on a show rather than really expressing herself. She knows that her antics is what sales records and draws in more twitter followers so she does whatever it takes. That does not make her unique, which just makes her a figure seeking attention. In other words, she comes across as fake to me which really takes away from her appeal.

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Human skin takes on the colour of smoked salmon when it is professionally removed in rectangular shapes from a cadaver. A good yield is about 5500 square centimetres. After being mashed up to remove moisture, some is destined to protect burn victims from life-threatening bacterial infections or, once further refined, for breast reconstructions after cancer. The use of human tissue “has really revolutionised what we can do in breast reconstruction surgery”, explains Dr Ron Israeli, a New York plastic surgeon. “Since we started using it in about 2005, it’s really become a standard technique.” A significant number of recovered tissues are transformed into products whose shelf names give little clue to their actual origin. They are used in the dental and beauty industries, for everything from plumping up lips to smoothing out wrinkles.

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The security of high-end handcuffs depends on a detainee not having access to certain small, precisely-shaped objects. In the age of easy 3D printing and other DIY innovations, that assumption may no longer apply. In a workshop Friday at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, a German hacker and security consultant who goes by the name “Ray” demonstrated a looming problem for handcuff makers hoping to restrict the distribution of the keys that open their cuffs: With plastic copies he cheaply produced with a laser-cutter and a 3D printer, he was able to open handcuffs built by the German firm Bonowi and the English manufacturer Chubb, both of which attempt to control the distribution of their keys to keep them exclusively in the hands of authorized buyers such as law enforcement.

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The mysterious disc-shaped object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea could be a relic from a giant World War II device placed there by the Nazis to disrupt Soviet submarine navigation. ­The object may be the concrete anchor of the device, which also had to be fitted with stainless steel mesh, Swedish naval officer and warfare history expert Anders Autellus told Swedish newspaper Expressen. It would interfere with submarine radar signals and make them crash. The mesh itself may well have eroded away over the decades, but the images of the object made by the Ocean X team exploring it show what appear to be holes, where it was attached to the foundation, he added.

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In the foreclosure-battered inland stretches of California, local government officials desperate for change are weighing a controversial but inventive way to fix troubled mortgages: Condemn them. Officials from San Bernardino County and two of its cities have formed a local agency to consider the plan. But investors who stand to lose money on their mortgage investments have been quick to register their displeasure.

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It’s relevant to understand that these children have inherited extra genes—that of TWO women and one man—and will be able to pass this extra set of genetic traits to their own offspring. One of the most shocking considerations here is that this was done—repeatedly—even though no one knows what the ramifications of having the genetic traits of three parents might be for the individual, or for their subsequent offspring. Based on what I’ve learned about the genetic engineering of plants, I’m inclined to say the ramifications could potentially be vast, dire, and completely unexpected. As a general, broad-strokes rule, it seems few scientists fond of gene-tinkering have a well-rounded or holistic view of living organisms, opting instead to view the human body as a machine. And as demonstrated with the multi-varied problems that have arisen from genetically engineered foods—from the development of superweeds and superpests, to the creation of a never-before-seen organism

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☛ Many Wall Street executives say wrongdoing is necessary: survey

A quarter of Wall Street executives see wrongdoing as a key to success, according to a survey by whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow released on Tuesday. In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.

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On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5” on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them. As we watch, directly overhead, two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead. They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he’s wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.

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NSA whistleblower Thomas A. Drake is backing the EFF’s lawsuit over the government’s massive spying program. Drake also had a lot to say about the establishment of a ‘surveillance society’ in America. In a video interview, he said it was ‘soft tyranny. It raises the specter of you’re automatically suspicious until we prove that you’re not. It raises the specter of a universal wiretap, a persistent universal wiretap on every single person, or if not, they can create one.’

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Trolled!

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Currently, large doses of chemotherapy are required when treating certain forms of cancer, resulting in toxic side effects. The chemicals enter the body and work to destroy or shrink the tumor, but also harm vital organs and drastically affect bodily functions. Now, University of Missouri scientists have found a more efficient way of targeting prostate tumors by using gold nanoparticles and a compound found in tea leaves. This new treatment would require doses that are thousands of times smaller than chemotherapy and do not travel through the body inflicting damage to healthy areas. The study is being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Lake County, Florida sheriff’s deputies who failed to identify themselves when knocking on a man’s door at 1:30AM at night immediately shot and killed the homeowner after he allegedly opened his door with a gun in hand. The man who was murdered, 26-year-old Andrew Lee Scott, was described by neighbors as a good person and “very nice guy.” The deputies realized later they got the wrong house, but for good measure they searched the man’s apartment and found drugs, which apparently justifies their murdering him randomly. The police are entirely unapologetic. Lt. John Herrell said of the incident, “The bottom line is, you point a gun at a deputy sheriff or police office, you’re going to get shot.” For police who refuse to identify themselves to point their guns at you is A-OK, yet for you to do the same in self-defense is grounds for summary execution.

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What makes this new legislation shocking is that we have seen the US government repeatedly use the “State Secrets” and the “National InSecurity card to suspend the Constitution at will to commit a wide variety of heinous activities from torture and indefinite detention without trial to outright forced drugging of prisoners and even repeated assassination by the government, of people including US citizens, which is now being done on the direction of the United States’ first even assassination czar. Keeping that in mind the fact that lawmakers are now trying to go after reporters that “publish government secrets” unequivocally amounts to an outright ban of any and all reporting on government corruption PERIOD because at the end of the day the corrupt and illegal activities conducted by government officials are done in secret in the first place.

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Five years ago a composer created music for use in a one-off anti-piracy video. However, without his permission it was used time and again on dozens of commercial DVDs such as Harry Potter. Even in the wake of a huge controversy over “corrupt” and “mafia-like” practices, the local music rights group that got involved in the case failed to pay him the money he was owed. The case went to court and this week the music rights group lost.

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Most girls as young as 6 are already beginning to think of themselves as sex objects, according to a new study of elementary school-age kids in the Midwest. Researchers have shown in the past that women and teens think of themselves in sexually objectified terms, but the new study is the first to identify self-sexualization in young girls. The study, published online July 6 in the journal Sex Roles, also identified factors that protect girls from objectifying themselves.

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Two Harvard engineers are planning to spray thousands of tonnes of sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, using a balloon flying 80,000 feet over Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The field experiment in solar geoengineering aims to ultimately create a technology to replicate the observed effects of volcanoes that spew sulphates into the stratosphere, using sulphate aerosols to bounce sunlight back to space and decrease the temperature of the Earth. David Keith, one of the investigators, has argued that solar geoengineering could be an inexpensive method to slow down global warming, but other scientists warn that it could have unpredictable, disastrous consequences for the Earth’s weather systems and food supplies. Environmental groups fear that the push to make geoengineering a “plan B” for climate change will undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

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“What really frightens me is not just the disastrous nature of Citizens United, but the whole trend that we are seeing lately, economically, of moving this country toward an oligarchic form of government,” he said. “What you have right now is incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and income… the Walton family of Walmart itself owns more wealth — one family — than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.” “You’ve got that reality out there, and then what’s happening now — what Citizens United is about — is these guys are not content to own the economy, to own the wealth of America, they now want to own lock, stock and barrel the political process as well.” The DISCLOSE Act would have required outside campaign groups to disclose those who contribute $10,000 or more. But it failed to move forward on Tuesday after Senate Republicans unanimously voted against it.

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More than 40 poles have been bent, buckled or broken in the past 18 months in one area of south Auckland, New Zealand, it is claimed. The signs, bearing legally required notices such as parking restrictions, are thought to have cost ratepayers thousands of dollars to replace. “Prostitutes use these street sign poles as dancing poles,” said Donna Lee, an elected member of the city council’s Otara-Papatoetoe Local Board. “The poles are part of their soliciting equipment and they often snap them. “Some of the prostitutes are big, strong people.”

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People left the “massive house party” and went about two miles to the Walmart, where more shots were fired about 11:20 p.m., according to a second police report. Men and women, most appearing to be teens on the YouTube video, threw produce around as they crowded into the store. The three-minute video shows people riding shopping carts and mugging for the camera in what apparently lasted several minutes. Gee said snacks and sodas were stolen, but no one was hurt and damage was minimal. A store security scanner also was damaged as everybody fled, the police report said. No identifiable Walmart employees are seen during the video. The gunshots were fired into the air outside the store, but no cars or people were hit, the report said. Flash mobs are usually a group of people who dance or sing together in a public place, captured on social media. But so-called “flash robs” like this one are a recent phenomena.

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A horrifying video of a woman being pounced upon by roughly twenty men after she left a bar in India has caused international outrage. In it, the woman is seemingly stripped, molested, and even burned with cigarettes as she screams for help for roughly thirty minutes, to no avail. Thanks Jasmine

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☛ Cannibal cult arrests in Papua New Guinea

Police in remote Papua New Guinea have arrested members of an alleged cannibal cult accused of killing at least seven people, eating their brains raw and making soup from their penises, a report said Friday. The 29 people were part of a 1,000-strong group formed to combat errant sorcerers who The National newspaper said had begun charging exorbitant fees. The cost of a witch doctor revealing a cause of death or casting out an evil spirit was usually 1000 kina ($472) cash, plus a pig and a bag of rice, but some were also demanding sex as payment. “It’s against our traditional ethics and morals for a sorcerer to have intercourse with a man’s wife or teenage daughter,” said one local cult leader in the Tangi area, inland from Madang province on PNG’s northeast coast.

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“I make a point of staying right at the edge of poverty. I don’t have a pair of pants without a hole in them, and the only pair of boots I have are on my feet. I don’t mess around with unnecessary stuff, so I don’t need much money. I believe it’s meant to be that way. There’s a ‘struggle’ you have to go through, and if you make a lot of money it doesn’t make the ‘struggle’ go away. It just makes it more complicated. If you keep poor, the struggle is simple. “ ~Von Dutch

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They are surely the most horrifying offshoot of modern technology – nuclear warheads which can smite hundreds of thousands of people dead within seconds, and leave lasting scars on a landscape for generations. And while most of us will have seen archive footage of nuclear explosions before, one thing we are unlikely to have heard is their sound. For, according to one expert, most films we see of a nuclear blast use stock ‘explosion’ sound effects for the bang – and audio footage is few and far between. But Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics, has shared a unigue video of a blast during America’s testing of nukes in the Yucca Mountain area of Nevada during the 1950s.

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No longer is it enough for Washington to simply use, cooperate with, or listen to private communications. Now the president claims the authority to order all of it seized– as in nationalized under federal control. In a sense, however, this sweeping new order is only somewhat unprecedented, at least in the Bush-Obama era of executive power. Potential seizure of communications infrastructure simply folds into a laundry list of resources that Obama declared authority to seize and manage in another recent Executive Order:

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Police in Papua New Guinea have unearthed a ‘cannibal cult’ in the jungle thought to be responsible for the murders of seven suspected witch doctors. The 29 cult members allegedly ate their victims’ brains raw and made soup from their penises, according to police officials. Madang Police Commander Anthony Wagambie said: “They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong; they admit what they’ve done openly.” Wagambie said the suspected killers believed their victims practiced “sanguma”, or sorcery, and had allegedly been extorting money and demanding sex from poverty-stricken villagers for supernatural services. The cult members are thought to have eaten the witch doctors’ organs in the belief that they would attain supernatural powers and become ‘bulletproof’.

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Dr. Twana Sparks, an ENT (Ears, Nose and Throat) surgeon, had just finished doing a tympanoplasty with mastoidectomy, a surgical procedure to correct a middle ear problem. The patient was a middle-thirties Hispanic man who lay stretched out before her on the operating table, still under anesthesia. After applying a dressing to the surgical site, Dr. Sparks, who was also the hospital chief of staff, reached inside the patient’s boxer shorts without wearing gloves, fished out his penis and pointed it at the ceiling. She observed fluid filled vesicles on the side of the shaft, indicating a sexually transmitted disease, and shouted “Oh Gross!” She then slapped the head of his penis three times, saying “Bad boy, bad boy, bad boy!” with each strike, as her all female operating team erupted in laughter.

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In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated widespread incidents of power thefts in Puerto Rico believed to be related to smart meter deployment. The FBI believed that former employees of the meter manufacturer and employees of the utility company were tampering with the meters charging between $300 to $1,000 to reprogram residential meters and $3,000 to reprogram commercial meters. The perpetrators were said to have hacked into the smart meters using an optical converter device connected to a laptop, allowing smart meters to connect with the computer. The hackers were able to change the settings for recording power consumptions using software available on the internet after making a connection. This method does not require the removal, alteration or disassembly of the meter.

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No music fan in his or her right mind would pull the plug on the legendary Bruce Springsteen and Sir Paul McCartney, but that’s exactly what London police did late Saturday night. Springsteen was at the tail end of a three-hour long performance in London’s Hyde Park when he brought the ex-Beatle onto the stage to do a couple of songs together. The pair went beyond the park’s 10:30 p.m. curfew by about half an hour, prompting police to cut off the juice.

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Jacqueline established The Snuggery because she believes in the healing power of touch. The Snuggery is a place to take a break from the hustle and bustle of life and focus on the simple restorative pleasure of touch. Though science has unquestionably supported the psychological and physical benefits of non-sexual touch, Americans distinctly lack it. It’s time for change. At The Snuggery, Jacqueline provides individuals with private snuggling sessions. She aims to make the world a gentler place, one snuggle at a time.

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16 escape stories with only one that makes sense The blind Chinese dissident, Chen Guangcheng has finally “escaped” the “brutal” treatment of the Chinese “regime” and landed in the “free” world. The world – in particular the American media – called this a human rights win for America.

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Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.

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Beaver and two other friends buy shirts with monsters on the front, each more gruesome than the next. Beaver is the only one who tricks his parents and wears his new sweatshirt to school. However, the principal doesn’t like it and an angry Ward comes to pick up Beaver.

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Shuffling along the road, holding tightly onto her grandmother’s hand, every step three-year-old Yu Yu takes is painful. The toddler suffers from an undiagnosed condition which causes her feet to grow at an alarmingly rapid rate. The youngster is forced to walk barefoot as her poverty-stricken family are unable to afford shoes big enough for her. Yu Yu’s feet are constantly swollen and heavy, making moving around extremely difficult.

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Commonly used baby soaps and shampoos, including products from Johnson & Johnson, Aveeno and CVS, can trigger a positive result on newborns’ marijuana screening tests, according to a recent study. A minute amount of the cleansing products in a urine sample — just 0.1 milliliters or less — was found to cause a positive result.

The military entertainment complex is an old phenomenon that binds Hollywood with the US military. Known as militainment, it serves both parties well. Filmmakers get access to high tech weaponry – helicopters, jet planes and air craft carriers while the Pentagon gets free and positive publicity. The latest offering to come from this relationship is Act of Valor and it takes the collaboration one step further. The producers get more than just equipment — they have cast active-duty military personnel in the lead roles, prompting critics to say the lines have become so blurred that it is hard to see where Hollywood ends and Pentagon propaganda begins. In this week’s feature, the Listening Post’s Nic Muirhead looks at the ties between the US military and Hollywood.

Evansville, Indiana police intent on “sending a message” that online threats against police will not be tolerated organized a massive raid against a forum troll on an online forum. The police decided to bring a TV crew to film their raid against their critic, they also brought a SWAT team. Rather than knock on the accused’s front door, which was wide open, the police instead threw two flash-bang stun grenades through their front window and storm door. Unfortunately, rather than finding the home occupied by a gun-toting cop killer, they found an entirely innocent grandmother and 18-year-old girl, who were both shocked and confused.

Small police departments across America are collecting battlefield-grade arsenals thanks to a program that allows them to get their hands on military surplus equipment – amphibious tanks, night-vision goggles, and even barber chairs or underwear – at virtually no cost, except for shipment and maintenance. Over the last five years, the top 10 beneficiaries of this “Department of Defense Excess Property Program” included small agencies such as the Fairmount Police Department. It serves 7,000 people in northern Georgia and received 17,145 items from the military. The cops in Issaquah, Washington, a town of 30,000 people, acquired more than 37,000 items

That new capability will drive the demand for even more raw data. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency, overseen by the U.S. director of national intelligence, has launched two projects that may help analysts use civilian video from YouTube, Vimeo and other sources. Investigators at the Finder program are studying ways to locate where and when a video was taken based solely on the image itself. That’s hard enough. But researchers at IARPA’s Aladdin are working on an even more challenging task: how to search for “specific events of interest.” If they succeed, analysts could feed in a name, a simple text description or a few sample videos of what they seek—say, “five people wearing backpacks next to a pickup truck”—and get back any number of clips that match the query.

To stop the ‘hate speech’ anarchy, Twitter is considering starting off by blocking the very possibility of replies from so-called ‘non-authoritative’ users, marked out by the absence of a profile picture, followers or bio information, as FT.com reports. This is the first step, but there might be more to come. However, the company’s management is concerned that by installing any kinds of ‘selective’ measures, they may put an end to the unique Twitter-style ‘freedom of tweets’ that has helped Arab revolutions. Anonymity was the key factor that allowed so many users there to join and have their say. “The reason we want to allow pseudonyms is there are lots of places in the world where it’s the only way you’d be able to speak freely,” FT quotes Dick Costolo as saying. Twitter is basically the ‘last harbor’ of anonymity, as it does not have to be linked with such powerful database platforms as Facebook and Google. Silencing trolls may hit those ‘revolutionary’ users as well.

“Well, were you having sex? What are you doing here?” The girl quickly responded “no, no, no, officer no,” the affidavit said. The girl told police she and her friend were just talking. But the man told the girl he “needed to check.” The girl asked “Check what?” “I need to see inside,” he responded. That’s when he ordered her to take off her pants and underwear so he could look for bruising or other evidence of sexual activity. In fear, the affidavit said, she complied. The girl told police she thought it “was the right thing to do” because he was an officer. Her 19-year-friend turned away, unable to watch, according to the affidavit. He told police he heard the man tell the girl “I need you to spread your legs wider so I can see.” The officer then used a flashlight to “inspect” her and told her to pull down her blouse so he could check for bruising, according to the police report. Then he returned the driver’s license to the boy and told them “Go home.”

Two north Florida “animals” are facing child porn charges after photos showing them raping a 4-year-old girl were found on a cell phone they left at a Walmart. Pictures on the phone showed convicted sex offender Alan Johnson, 33, and his girlfriend, Jennifer Sparks, 37, abusing the girl “in every way imaginable,” Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott told WSOC-TV. “My most seasoned detectives here said that its the worst they’ve ever seen,” he said. A shopper found the phone in a shopping cart at a Cape Coral Walmart on June 2 and turned it in, police said.

On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July, the Earth’s official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second.

A local couple who claim to be Satanists believe they’re a victim of a hate crime and were targeted because of their religious beliefs. Someone cut down a political poster stating, “VOTE SATAN” from their front porch where they live in Mountain View, a suburb of Denver. “We are Satanists… Satanists,” said Luigi Bellaviste. Luigi and Angie Bellaviste belong to the Church of Satan. They even have a Satanic Bible in their home. Thanks Jasmine

Increasingly, smartphones are creating problems in the backcountry, particularly in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where, officials say, more hikers are skipping basic gear — particularly a map, compass, and flashlight – and relying too heavily on phones with GPS and a slew of gear-like apps, including compasses and trail maps, to bail them out of a jam. “Being prepared for a hike does not mean having your cellphone charged,” said Major Kevin Jordan from the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, which oversees 150 to 180 rescues each year. “To find people with a map and compass is just incredibly rare. It boggles my mind. But when we rescue someone, I hear a lot of regret, a lot of people saying, ‘I should have brought more than my phone, but everywhere I go at home I have cellphone coverage.’ ”

Drug agents removed more than 41,000 marijuana plants from a 40-acre area near Warner Springs in northeastern San Diego County, Drug Enforcement Administration officials announced Monday. The haul, conducted Sunday and Monday, was the largest marijuana seizure on private property in the county’s history, DEA officials said. No arrests were made, but the investigation is continuing, officials said. The removal, from a remote, secluded area called Sunshine Summit, required 35 DEA agents and officers from the multi-agency Narcotics Task Force. Also found on the property were two large water tanks, chemicals for fertilizer, and a 30-round magazine for a semiautomatic weapon. The marijuana removed from the site was estimated to have a wholesale value of $41 million.

✪ Deputy who tried to smuggle drug-stuffed burrito gets 2 years

A former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy accused of trying to smuggle a burrito stuffed with heroin into a courthouse lockup was sentenced Monday to two years in jail. Henry Marin, who was once portrayed as a dim-witted bumbler on a reality television show that focused on sheriff’s recruits, said nothing as a courtroom deputy handcuffed him and led him away to the type of cell he was once responsible for guarding.

The ‘GM babies’ were born into women who had trouble conceiving their own children. In order to ‘birth’ the babies, extra genes from a female donor were inserted into the women’s eggs before they were fertilized. After conception, scientists fingerprinted 2 of the one-year-old children and confirmed that they inherited DNA from 3 adults — one man and 2 women. What this means is that due to inheriting these extra genes through the genetic modification process, they will now be able to pass them along to their offspring. In other words, these genetically modified babies — if allowed to mate with non-GM humans — could potentially alter the very genetic coding of generations to come. Genetecists state that this genetic modification method may one day be used to create babies “with extra, desired characteristics such as strength or high intelligence.”

Inmates in a Brazilian prison can shave time off their sentences by becoming living sources of green energy. All they need to do is turn the wheel of a bike connected to a power generator. For every 16 hours of pedaling the inmates of the Santa Rita do Sapucaí prison have their sentences reduced by one day, according to a Jornal Nacional report. The generators the prisoners put in motion charge batteries, which are taken to the city center to power some of the street lights. The two bikes installed in the prison are enough to light six bulbs. The reason behind the offer is not to profit from free labor however. Rather it is meant to give inmates an incentive to keep themselves in good shape, says city judge José Henrique Mallmann, who introduced the idea. Thanks Bjarni

Colombia has decriminalized cocaine and marijuana, saying that people cannot be jailed for possessing the drugs for personal use. Anyone caught with less 20 grams (0.705 ounces) of marijuana or one gram (0.035 ounces) of cocaine for personal use will not be prosecuted or detained, but could be required to receive physical or psychological treatment, depending on their level of intoxication, according to Colombia Reports. Colombian Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon said law enforcement would continue its fight against drug trafficking, but would not make further comment.

Do you know how your tax dollars are spent? US radio host Dennis Bernstein and investigative reporter Dave Lindorff illustrate just how much US tax money goes towards the country’s war chest. “People have to realise that 53 cents of every dollar that they are paying into taxes is going to the military to an astonishing figure there is an enormous, enormous amount of money being blown on war an killing and destruction.”

Sixty million euro has been stolen from bank accounts in a massive cyber bank raid after fraudsters raided dozens of financial institutions around the world. According to a joint report by software security firm McAfee and Guardian Analytics, more than 60 firms have suffered from what it has called an “insider level of understanding”. “The fraudsters’ objective in these attacks is to siphon large amounts from high balance accounts, hence the name chosen for this research – Operation High Roller,” the report said. “If all of the attempted fraud campaigns were as successful as the Netherlands example we describe in this report, the total attempted fraud could be as high as 2bn euro (£1.6bn).” The automated malicious software programme was discovered to use servers to process thousands of attempted thefts from both commercial firms and private individuals. The stolen money was then sent to so-called mule accounts in caches of a few hundreds and 100,000 euro (£80,000) at a time.

Nearly every day, and often several times a day, there is fresh news of privacy invasions as companies hone their ability to imperceptibly assemble a vast amount of data about anyone with a smartphone, laptop or credit card. Retailers, search engines, social media sites, news organizations — all want to know as much as they can about their visitors and users so that ads can be targeted as precisely as possible. But data mining, which has become central to the corporate bottom line, can be downright creepy, with companies knowing what you search for, what you buy, which websites you visit, how long you browse — and more. Earlier this year, it was revealed that Target realized a teenage customer was pregnant before her father knew; the firm identifies first-term pregnancies through, among other things, purchases of scent-free products. It’s akin to someone rifling through your wallet, closet or medicine cabinet, but in the digital sphere no one picks your pocket or breaks into your house

As location tracking by cell phone companies becomes increasingly accurate and widespread, the question of who your location data actually belongs to remains unresolved. Privacy activists in the U.S. say the law has not kept pace with developing technology and argue for more stringent privacy standards for cell phone companies. As Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania professor put it, “all of the rules are in a state of enormous uncertainty and flux.” The Obama administration has maintained that mobile phone users have “no reasonable expectation of privacy.” The administration has argued against more stringent standards for police and the FBI to obtain location data.

After being challenged by his lab, the DHS dared Humphreys’ crew to hack into a drone and take command. Much to their chagrin, they did exactly that. Humphrey tells Fox News that for a few hundreds dollar his team was able to “spoof” the GPS system on board the drone, a technique that involves mimicking the actual signals sent to the global positioning device and then eventually tricking the target into following a new set of commands. And, for just $1,000, Humphreys says the spoofer his team assembled was the most advanced one ever built. “Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys tells Fox. The real danger here, however, is that the government is currently considering plans that will allow local law enforcement agencies and other organizations from coast-to-coast to control drones of their own in America’s airspace.

At a hearing yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee took up the issue of online tracking, the browser-based Do Not Track flag, and, in an unlikely turn of events, cybersecurity. The hearing included testimony from Ohio State University Law School’s Prof. Peter Swire, Mozilla’s Alex Fowler, the Association of National Advertisers’ Bob Liodice, and TechFreedom’s Berin Szoka. While there were a number of heated moments in the hearing, the most surprising was the advertising industry’s claim that respecting consumer choice will harm “cybersecurity.” This new argument from the advertising industry only raises more concerns for the civil liberties implications of online tracking and was, as Rockefeller aptly noted, little more than a “red herring.”

EFF has pressed for legislation to prevent digital book retailers from handing over information about individuals’ reading habits as evidence to law enforcement agencies without a court’s approval. Earlier this year, California instituted the “reader privacy act,” which makes it more difficult for law-enforcement groups to gain access to consumers’ digital reading records. Under the new law, agencies must get a court order before they can require digital booksellers to turn over information revealing which books their customers have browsed, purchased, read and underlined. The American Civil Liberties Union and EFF, which partnered with Google and other organizations to push for the legislation, are now seeking to enact similar laws in other states. Bruce Schneier, a cyber-security expert and author, worries that readers may steer clear of digital books on sensitive subjects such as health, sexuality and security—including his own works—out of fear that their reading is being tracked

✪ What is causing the outbreak of Flesh Eating Diseases?

However, some people have surmised that the use of antibiotics in our food supply is the main culprit while the overuse of antibiotics by doctors further exasperates the problem. In the 1940’s farmers began treating their livestock with antibiotics. It was soon discovered that if you fed antibiotics to your chickens, pigs and cows on a regular basis that the animals would get fatter quicker and with less feed. In order to compete with the other factory farms farmers started feeding their animals antibiotics everyday! And as we all know by now, the more antibiotics one takes whether through a prescription or through eating antibiotic laden meat, the more resistant one gets. As a side note I also wonder if eating all this antibiotic laden meat has contributed to the obesity epidemic in America..I mean if large doses of antibiotics cause animals to get fat while eating less, wouldn’t that do the same in humans?

Asian eyes are traditionally thinner and narrower than Caucasian or African-American eyes, which tend to be rounder and wider. Asian eyes tend to resemble the oval shape of almonds, although some can look even narrower than that. Most Asians have only a single eyelid (meaning their eyelids don’t have a prominent crease). You can make your eyes look Asian by using makeup or undergoing plastic surgery.

There are many reasons why you might want to look Asian: maybe you’re playing an Asian person in a school play, maybe you’re going to an anime convention and want to look like a certain character, maybe you’re dressing up for a costume party or for Halloween, or maybe you just want to change your appearance for fun, or to disguise your appearance to evade the law. In any case, this article will allow you to (sort of) go from looking White to looking Asian, without much fuss or money needed.

As the sprawling surveillance site being constructed by the National Security Agency (NSA) in Utah grows larger and nearer completion every day, the domestic spy service remains tightlipped about just how much and what kind of personal electronic data they have already collected and collated. Not only does the NSA refuse to provide such information, it insists that it cannot be forced to.

John and Jessie Bates and their 7-year-old son, Tyler, began experiencing mysterious health problems months after after moving into a new home in Suquamish, Washington in March 2007. Tyler was having trouble breathing, Jessie developed a bizarre rash, and John was “perpetually sick,” according to My Fox Phoenix. Though a standard inspection found no problems, the family suspected the house itself was the culprit. A year and a half later, a neighbor revealed the home’s sordid secret: the previous occupant had used it as a meth lab. Even more certain that the building was behind their ailments, the Bates began ripping up the floors and walls. They found “iodine-like staining on the walls and human feces under the floor,” Jessie told Fox News.

Madrid’s own Spok, Neko and Rosh bombed Gran Via, the main street of “Mad City” using an innovative technique which consists of cutting vinyl from a massive block-long advertisement and then peeling off their letters. This new subtractive method makes a permanent mark on the street with minimum effort. Quick, smooth and real nice work from these three amigos.

After inviting students to submit personal stories of the abuse of prescription drugs for academic advantage, The Times received almost 200 submissions. While a majority focused on the prevalence of these drugs on college campuses, many wrote about their increasing appearance in high schools, the focus of our article on Sunday. We have highlighted about 30 of the submissions below, almost all written by current high school students or recent graduates. In often vivid detail — snorting their own pills, stealing pills from friends — the students described an issue that they found upsetting, valuable, dangerous and, above all else, real. Most of them claimed that it was a problem rooted not in drugs per se, but with the pressure that compelled some youngsters to use them.

Theft is followed closely by sex crimes and child pornography charges, with 14 such incidents listed in Blackburn’s report. Six TSA employees were charged with possession of child pornography; one of them got caught because he “uploaded explicit pictures of young girls to an Internet site on which he also posted a photograph of himself in his TSA uniform,” the report notes. Eight others were charged variously with child molestation, rape (including child rape), and even running a prostitution ring. It’s not hard to figure out why persons possessing such proclivities would seek jobs where they would be able to ogle and grope other people’s private parts with impunity.

About those “extended overdraft” fees: consumer advocates have noted that they are not unlike shady payday loans that charge consumers a tremendous amount of interest to get some needed cash in the short term. The Consumer Federation of America recently compared the two practices, and came up with some disturbing findings: As it has before, the Consumer Federation reported the cost at each bank of a $100 overdraft repaid two weeks later as if it were a short-term loan. It said the best deal, at Citibank, was equivalent to a loan with an annual percentage rate of 884 percent. Some banks, including PNC and RBS Citizens, charge more than 2,000 percent. Another thing: the banks examined in the Pew report have continued to reserve the right to process withdrawals by dollar amount, rather than chronologically. This practice “maximizes the number of times an account goes negative, thus increasing overdraft fees” – and the banks can choose to reorder transactions whenever they want